we re wrapping up in week s tdr 50 focus on north carolina the state that gives us great barbecue, a look at some of the state s rising stars, these are politicians to keep an eye on. we start on the republican side with tim moore. he s a state representative now but could get elected house speaker in 2015 as a kind of compromise candidate who can bring together various factions. he made news two years ago when he sponsored a bill to ban tv for death-row inmates. a republican on the state s senate side has eyed a national run in the recent past, senate pro tem phil burger opted not to run for u.s. senate this year but he s considered to be one of the most powerful people in north carolina. big state budget votes usually go his way. and get this, burger rarely gets his hands dirty in the process. not an easy thing to do. several north carolina democrats are proving to be promising
to phil early on. you know, we can t do the 6:00 a.m. stuff anymore. it s garbage. and phil, through the numbers, he goes, that s when the most people watch you. that s when the most influential people watch you. yeah. people get up so early now. they start working early. they work at home. they re on their treadmills. all of these, you know, things that we assumed we knew about boomers and about the economy has completely changed. the news demographic has always been 50-plus. the news about that is that there are just so many more of us. right. but we are getting our news i love the newspaper, you know, tell me how much i have to pay you to keep delivering me, you know, this. right. but i also get news all day long, as everybody else does, you know, streaming. you know, you keep checking, refresh, refresh, refresh. right. you know, we re the
and that s what was said. we don t have to worry about that, and we don t have to worry about the deficits. i think you can do two things at once. i say it every day. we can invest in education, r&d, we can invest in infrastructure. we can grow this economy in the short term, but we can take care of the long-term debt by focusing on health care costs over a generation, by cutting defense spending, but tax reform, by doing all of these things. it should be simple to do. washington seems incapable of doing it. and these debt deniers, i m curious if you agree with mika and richard haass and steve rattner that these debt deniers have their head in the sand as much as climate change deniers do. i think the whole political class refuse to look forward. and the cbo takes a ten-year view, and that ten-year view is pretty ugly. that s the problem. and yet the politics and this kind of short-term stimulus and let s look one year, let s look two years, let s not worry about
but what isn t factored into that and i m not policy and i m not an economist but what i do know is if boomers those who are not being hammered by the recession, i know yesterday that s what you were talking about, which is a reality, but a lot of us are still engaged in the economy. we are still producers. we re not just takers. takers, but we are still producing and contributing to the growth of an economy. and i don t think that s kind of factored into people s expectations that we suddenly are going to start being, you know, plugged up to machines and sucking money out of the economy. well, that s why i think it s so smart that you re producing programming that appeals to a demographic that is important, powerful, rich and engaged. so then my next question would be why high definition? that s all. no. what do you think of morning television? very dynamic.
and he encounters the state legislature which is run by brilliant politician of the speaker assembly in those days who had been a great senator, by the way, and willie brown and bob moretti and mosconi. at the end of three months, he said this guy is a lot smarter than we realized, and you can work with him. they would go in and close the door and they d make the deals at the state level. that went on for two terms. by the way, that was the union negotiator coming out in reagan, and reagan always said, it was a lot harder dealing with jack warner than it was gorbachev. and he was serious. of course he was. but the point is, california was the equivalent of the sixth largest nation in the world. i mean, it was not just some small town state legislature. this was a huge economy, a big-state budget, a university system. they had to do something about the mental health institutions, for example, in the state. and it was exploding in terms of population. so by the time he got to